BOSTON – A veteran firefighter and longtime Quincy resident has been tapped to lead the nation’s oldest fire department.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh announced Monday that he had chosen Joseph E. Finn, a deputy fire chief who has served with the Boston Fire Department for nearly three decades, to take over as fire commissioner and chief. Finn, who served as the face of the department after two firefighters were lost in a fatal brownstone blaze in March, will be the city’s first permanent commissioner since Roderick J. Fraser Jr. resigned in January.

“Chief Finn’s experience and leadership style, along with his commitment to diversity and fairness, will help move our Fire Department into an even more successful era of service to the people of Boston,” Walsh said in a statement.

Finn joined the Boston Fire Department in 1984 and steadily rose through the ranks, becoming deputy chief of personnel in 2001 and division commander in 2005. He said Monday that he was “humbled” by the mayor’s decision to appoint him commissioner.

“It’s an honor and a privilege,” he said. “The Boston Fire Department is the oldest fire department in the country and, in my humble opinion, the finest department in the world.”

In announcing Finn’s appointment, Walsh credited the former Marine with expanding the ranks of medical technicians in the department through a new training program and pushing legislation that has given the fire service a greater role in emergency medical responses.

Finn said he plans to continue to emphasize the fire department’s role in medical care as commissioner, particularly through the use of naloxone, a overdose-reversing drug best known by the trade name Narcan that the Quincy Police Department has pioneered as a weapon in the fight against opiate addiction. Finn said the Boston Fire Department is working to train its more than 1,400 firefighters on the use of the drug – starting with those working in neighborhoods most effected by opiate addiction – and will soon have all companies equipped to use it.

“The state and the country is going through this opiate-addiction epidemic, and the death toll is inexcusable,” he said. “We need to be doing more.”

Before joining the department, Finn served in the Marine Corps from 1979 to 1982. He has owned a house on Quincy's Shawmut Street since 1988, according to city records.